K.C. Davis > Quotes

“Environmentalism is important. But we are not going to fix the earth by shaming people with mental health and neurodiverse needs out of adaptive routines they need to function.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“I’ll say it again: you don’t exist to serve your space; your space exists to serve you.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Real boundaries aren’t about what you say or do—they are internal. They provide a sense of where I end and you begin—what’s my responsibility and what’s not.”
― K.C. Davis, Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship

“But the moral issue is not that that partner is not contributing enough—it’s that they feel more entitled to rest than their partner and are exploiting their partner’s labor to get it. If you feel more entitled to more respect because of your gender or the size of your paycheck, that is wrong.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“favorite boundary phrase, which is “thank you for your concern, but I am not taking any feedback on this issue right now.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“tidy things up not because it’s bad that it’s messy but because it has reached the end of that cycle of functionality and I need to reset it so it can have another twenty-four hours of it serving me.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“If you are completing care tasks from a motivation of shame, you are probably also relaxing in shame too—because care tasks never end and you view rest as a reward for good boys and girls. So if you ever actually let yourself sit down and rest, you’re thinking, “I don’t deserve to do this. There is more to do.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Task initiation barriers usually present themselves as difficulties in transitions.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“could exhaust myself making it look like a showroom all the time, but then I wouldn’t have time to take my kids to go get Halloween costumes today, or talk to a friend on the phone for an hour, or write this book.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“In the end, the approach that you are motivated to do and enjoy doing is the most “efficient,” because you are actually doing it and not avoiding”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“Next time you are trying to talk yourself into doing a care task, what would it be like to replace the voice that says, “Ugh, I should really go clean my house right now because it’s a disaster,” with “It would be such a kindness to future me if I were to get up right now and do _______. That task will allow me to experience comfort, convenience, and pleasure later.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“You weren’t getting up when you were being mean to yourself either, so at least you can be nice to yourself. No one ever shamed themselves into better mental health.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“One of the greatest challenges with drawing boundaries is becoming comfortable with being misunderstood.”
― K.C. Davis, Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship

“It’s stressful to try to summon up 100 percent of the momentum to do something while sitting on the couch. Let yourself use 5 percent energy to do 5 percent of the task.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“The impact that you could have on the world when you are fully functioning far outweighs the negligible negative impact that one household’s disposable plastic or extra water usage will have.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“Chores → care tasks Chores are obligations. Care tasks are kindness to self. Cleaning → resetting the space Cleaning is endless. Resetting the space has a goal. It’s so messy in here! → this space has reached the end of its functional cycle It’s so messy in here feels like failure. This space has reached the end of its functional cycle is morally neutral. Good enough is good enough → good enough is perfect Good enough is good enough sounds like settling for less. Good enough is perfect means having boundaries and reasonable expectations. Shortcut:”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“it’s not failure. It’s laundry. Keeping it morally neutral actually helped me get it done.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“9 Take a look at the history behind the term self-care sometime. Start with googling Audre Lorde. It wasn’t always about yoga and hobbies.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“You don't exist to serve your space; your space exists to serve you.”
― KC Davis

“chapter 37 exercise sucks i blame PE class as the first offender. I really do. At such an early age kids who love to play active games are made to run laps instead. Okay, maybe that isn’t every school, but it was certainly the first time I remember someone divorcing physical activity from fun and creating the demon that is exercise. Then diet culture came along and told us the reason we should be engaging this exercise is primarily to keep our bodies thin and attractive. These things have really wrecked our relationship to joyful body movement. If you are motivated to an activity by body shame, experience the activity as a chorus of unpleasant sensory experiences (pain, boredom, and sweat are my three least favorite things in the world), and then end with no immediate results, why on earth would you like that activity or want to do it ever again?”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“anything worth doing is worth doing half-assed.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“realized that I only ever wanted to be skinny because I wanted to be loved and happy. But I already have that.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“food is morally neutral you deserve to eat. Nothing you ate yesterday, said today, or have left undone for tomorrow can take away your right to be fed. Your inability to create a nutritiously perfect meal today does not mean your body is better off not eating. All calories are good calories when you’re having a hard time. There are no good or bad foods. There are no right or wrong foods. And I’m gonna say it: there are no foods that are absolutely healthy or unhealthy. Healthy is a wholistic state of being that requires more than just knowing the amount and type of nutrients in the food you are eating. Being kind to yourself while eating ice cream is healthier than hating yourself while eating a salad. Anxiety and perfectionism are not good for your health. At the end of the day, your relationship to food is as much a factor in your health as fueling your body in a way that makes you feel good is.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“I would like to acknowledge Dr. Brené Brown and Dr. Kristin Neff as profound influences on my work, as their research on shame and self-compassion, respectively, has been foundational for me. I would also like to acknowledge Caroline Dooner, whose book The F*ck It Diet introduced me to the Intuitive Eating principles of food and body neutrality, a concept that springboarded me into questioning what other aspects of my life were neither good nor bad, and Lesley Cook, PsyD, who has contributed so much to my understanding of executive functioning and how best to help those who struggle with it.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“However, when I sit down to write or to work on my business, everything flows naturally. Sometimes I have to push myself slightly to get over a hurdle, but the hurdles always feel surmountable. I actually have to set a timer to remind me to look at the clock because I will get carried away and lose track of time. I feel creative, energized, and rewarded at the end of the day.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“blame does not go to one person alone, but rather that two people are in a system. They act in relation to each other. The enemy is not each other but the dynamic that is triggered between them.”
― K.C. Davis, Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship

“It’s just going to look like this again tomorrow.” I find this stems from that binary view of care tasks that they can be only either done or not done and that done is the superior state. But keeping everything done isn’t the point. Keeping things functional is the point because here’s the thing: it will look like that again tomorrow only if I clean it today. If I don’t clean it, it will be even more messy because we live here”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“In fact, it almost always feels like failing when you’re in it. When I look back at sixteen-year-old me in rehab, sobbing alone and feeling worthless, constantly being told I wasn’t making enough progress, I see now she was doing her best. I sometimes wish someone at the time could have seen it and told me so. But that’s okay. I tell her myself now all the time.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Understandable behavior and acceptable behavior are not the same thing.”
― K.C. Davis, Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship

“In a good relationship: The good times are really good, And the bad times are safe.”
― K.C. Davis, Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship